[Podcast]: On Incels & Neo-Reactionaries

Last week I was on ABC’s Drive program to talk about intel culture and online far-right communities. My argument is that intel culture comes out of both online’s privileging of white male reaction but also the social media twin logics of data and affect. Incels, primed with intense misogynistic animus, are given both a realtime ranking of their low status, through likes and other forms of social affirmation/rejection. Pathological drives are rapidly intensified by social media’s immediacy.

I make an analogy to two Todd Solondz characters, Toby Oxman, played by Paul Giamatti in Storytelling, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Allen Mellencamp in Happiness. Imagine how quickly Oxman would become Mellencamp if the High School yearbook he wistfully thumbs is live interactive and offering constant social status updates. All this is to say of course misogyny and the social and sexual violence of patriarchy predate online, its just that mechanics of online exist to accelerate the neurotic and surveillance aspects of patriarchy. After all Facebook was created as a means to rank the sexual desirability of women!